The Agentic Commercial Model
Fessal Rahman on the commercial operating model transformation every business deploying agentic AI needs — and almost none have made.
"Every enterprise is racing to deploy AI. Almost none have asked what happens to their commercial model when it works."
— Fessal Rahman, Dead Model WalkingThe commercial operating model, not the technology, decides who wins agentic AI.
The Framework
A structured commercial operating model for the agentic AI era — nine layers a software business must rebuild when its customers, its users, and its competitors are deploying AI agents at scale. Move one layer and leave the rest untouched, and the model leaks at the seams you didn't touch.
Whether the commercial structure embodies the new operating model, rather than describing how work used to be done.
Reaching and winning the buyer who actually decides now — including a buyer's own agents shortlisting vendors.
Rebuilding the value metric so price scales with value delivered, not seats consumed.
Equipping teams to sell outcomes rather than features, and answer why pay for this if the AI does the work.
Rewarding the behaviour the AI strategy actually needs, so the comp plan pulls with strategy instead of against it.
Measuring what the customer consumes and values — the precondition for usage- or outcome-based pricing.
CS structured and measured to drive and prove value realisation, not just manage renewals.
Recognition, forecasting, billing and unit economics rebuilt for variable, consumption and outcome revenue.
The CRM, CPQ, billing and analytics stack capable of running the new model, not blocking it.
Built By an Operator
Fessal Rahman is Group Executive Commercial Director at The Access Group (Hg Capital), leading commercial operations across a 20+ company software portfolio with over $1B in ARR, and founder of FR Advisory. His career spans McKinsey, Bain, and Cloudinary.
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